The palm trees of Alfred Russel Wallace in the classroom: the teaching and learning of biological classification through discursive interactions

Abstract

The voyage of the English naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace (1823-1913) to Brazil in the mid-nineteenth century, and his studies on the palms of the Amazon region, served as a basis for the elaboration and application of a didactic sequence to promote teaching and the learning of biological contents related to the biological classification and phylogeny of living beings. The didactic sequence, composed of eight classes, was applied to high school students of a public school in the city of São Paulo. The aim of this research is to analyze, in one of the eight classes of components of the didactic sequence, the construction of meanings in the social plan of the classroom, through the use of an analytical tool of the discursive interactions between teacher and students. We used the reference system developed by Mortimer and Scott (2002), based on teaching focuses (teacher intentions and classroom discourse content), communicative (dialogic or authority, interactive or non-interactive) and actions (patterns of teacher interaction and intervention). The analytical tool made it possible to characterize in the construction of meanings a "teaching spiral" articulated between the communicative approaches of the teacher and the contents worked (historical, scientific and meta-scientific contents) in a biology class from the learning of an episode of the history of the Biology.